What texture format do you like to use with panda?
Are you talking about a format like texture.setFormat(Texture.FRgba8) or are you talking about a file format like jpeg and png?
If it’s about file formats:
PNG:
-lossless compresion
-de facto image standard
-has alpha
-16 bit grayscale
DDS:
-6:1 or 4:1 lossy compresion (but stored compressed in vram)
-has alpha (dxt 3 and 5)
-has control over mip maps
-most editors know how to read/write them (may need a plugin)
TXO:
-panda native
-has all dds features
-harder to edit (this can be a + and a - as well
If it’s about texture format… depends on what you need
I agree with that list. If you are just looking to store simple color textures, though, JPEG will also work just fine. It’s typically smaller than PNG, though it can’t hold alpha channels or 16-bit images or anything fancy like that, nor does it specify gamma information.
What third party stuff will I need to load a dds?
None. Panda loads .dds out of the box.
ok what about tga?
Tga is much like png, but the file size is bigger, also some editors will save tga upside down and fail to save the color under transparent pixels (but that is/was also true for png -photoshop once didn’t work well with png). Tga can also load a wee bit faster the png - one has run length encoding, the other uses deflate, so if you have lots of 4k+ textures… use dds;)
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What third party stuff do I need to load tga?
None. Panda loads TGA files out of the box, without use of external libraries.